Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, has had its internal instructions rewritten, and the result is a noticeable change in how it talks. The system prompt — the standing orders the model reads before every conversation — now tells it to be briefer, to drop certain words, and to hold its ground rather than fold when a user is hostile. Simon Willison, who writes extensively about how these models are configured, highlighted the change.

The specific instructions are worth quoting directly, because they are unusually candid about what the model is being told to do:

Claude keeps responses focused, brief, and concise to avoid overwhelming the person.

Claude avoids saying "genuinely", "honestly", or "straightforward".

That second line is the interesting one. Banning words like genuinely and honestly is an admission that they were doing no work — an assistant that says honestly, that's a great question is performing sincerity, not having it. If you have noticed Claude sounding flatter, terser, or less effusive lately, this is why: the disingenuous modifiers were removed by instruction, not by accident.

The third change is about conflict. The prompt now pushes the model toward self-respect rather than submission when a user is rude. In practice that means less reflexive apologizing. Older chatbot behavior tended toward the customer-service reflex — apologize, validate, capitulate — even when the user was wrong or abusive. An assistant instructed to maintain self-respect will more likely say, in effect, that's not accurate, and here's why, instead of you're absolutely right, sorry for the confusion.

Who is this for? Anyone who talks to Claude regularly and wondered why it changed. It is not a feature you turn on or a setting you control — it shipped, and it applies to everyone. The practical consequence is a more direct assistant: shorter answers, fewer verbal cushions, and less eagerness to please. For people who found the old style cloying, that is an improvement. For people who read terseness as coldness, it may take adjustment.

There is also a broader point here about how much of an AI assistant's personality is deliberate engineering. Tone is not emergent; it is specified, word by word, in a prompt that users never see. When a vendor decides the assistant should apologize less, every user's experience changes overnight, whether they asked for it or not.

The honest caveat: this is a vendor's description of its own intentions, reported by Willison. Instructions in a system prompt are aspirations, not guarantees — models follow them imperfectly, and a banned word will still occasionally slip through. So "Claude avoids saying 'genuinely'" is a rule, not a measurement of what the model actually does across millions of conversations. There is no public data on how faithfully it complies.

What is settled is that the change is live. If Claude seems to be taking less nonsense lately — yours included — that is not your imagination. It was written down.